"I remember a conversation I had with my mother. She announced her thoughts that my tangled hair and unshaven legs were unsightly mechanisms behind which I hid the "real beauty" that I could possess, but that I didn't think I "deserved". She contended that my legs and my hair were relics of my inability to recover a sense of self-worth after years of childhood bullying. She insisted that by shirking my potential for (a very particular) beauty, I was permitting the bullies of my childhood to parasitize my current life. Her words devastated me. I felt like they trivialized a hard-won part of my identity. She had co-opted a necessary part of my survivorship and dressed it up as failure. And she was partially correct. There was a long, long time in my life when I didn't think I was good enough- for any kind of beauty, or for much else. I did everything I could conceive of to blend in, to become invisible. I worked desperately to mask, compensate, and apologize for the ways in which I thought I was dissimilar to my classmates. As I grew older, I realized that I would never be able to shave away, brush away, scrub away, give away enough pieces of myself to move stealthily through dangerous waters. Piece by piece, I began to collect all that I'd surrendered.
I knew that being invisible would never be enough to keep anyone safe from the systems that are in place to assimilate or destroy their differences, so I began to resist systems that reward people for homologizing themselves. I started to make space for myself in all the places I stood. I came to conceptualize the ways in which I dismantled oppressive systems-- like my feral hair and boyish grooming-- as a kind of triage that made the world safer for me to be in. I wanted myself to be safer, but I wanted others to be safer, too. Because my body was all I had to throw at the machinery, my body is what I used. It was wounding to hear my mother talk about my tangles and boyishness as if they were symptoms of shame, rather than as badges of honor. The ways in which I navigate through the world, and the body that I do it in, are not accessories of damage, or gimmicks of concealment. They are the evidence of my refusal to be concealed."
I knew that being invisible would never be enough to keep anyone safe from the systems that are in place to assimilate or destroy their differences, so I began to resist systems that reward people for homologizing themselves. I started to make space for myself in all the places I stood. I came to conceptualize the ways in which I dismantled oppressive systems-- like my feral hair and boyish grooming-- as a kind of triage that made the world safer for me to be in. I wanted myself to be safer, but I wanted others to be safer, too. Because my body was all I had to throw at the machinery, my body is what I used. It was wounding to hear my mother talk about my tangles and boyishness as if they were symptoms of shame, rather than as badges of honor. The ways in which I navigate through the world, and the body that I do it in, are not accessories of damage, or gimmicks of concealment. They are the evidence of my refusal to be concealed."
It puts to rest the feelings that I've been having about my skin being some kind of karma, like all the bad things I've ever said and done are somehow coming to the surface of me. Ultimately it's still my skin, it's still a piece of me and I have a choice about the way it makes me feel. The above writing also makes me incredibly proud and grateful for my mother. For being so unconditionally supportive and loving. For never demanding anything of me other than the pursuit of happiness....
